A Social History of Amateur Music-Making and Scottish National Identity: Scotland’s Printed Music, 1880-1951

Karen McAulay shows that the nature of the music, the song and fiddle tune books’ contents, the paratext around the collections, its packaging, marketing and dissemination all document the social history of an era whose everyday music has often been dismissed as not significant or indeed, properly ’old’ enough to merit consideration.

Karen McAulay is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland. Her book, Our Ancient National Airs: Scottish Song Collecting from the Enlightenment to the Romantic Era, was published by Ashgate in 2013. She has contributed chapters to Understanding Scotland Musically and Music by Subscription (2018, 2022, both Routledge).